- Right now LLMs have a slight advantage over stackoverflow etc in that they'll react to your specific question/circumstances, but they also require you to doublecheck everything they spit out. I don't think that will ever change, and I think most of the hype comes from people whose salaries depend on it being right around the corner or people who are playing a speculation game (if I learn this tool I'll never have to work again/ avoid this tool will doom me to poverty forever).
- This take shows up a lot and it's a bad one.
"I can surround your child with dangerous unhealthy things and do my best to corrupt and poison them, there should be no limit to this behavior whatsoever because if I succeed it's your fault for being bad parents! All you have to do is say no, it's not like it's my full time job to make end-runs around you with the aid of behavioral science and psychology and a budget, no no no guiding your children morally is as simple as saying no once, are you too stupid and lazy to do that?".
- >The long term issue that many people don't seem willing to mention out loud is that we will eventually make humanity obsolete and robots will literally take control.
what are you talking about; the main marketing strategy for so terribly many ai companies is to run around declaring the end is soon because their product is so powerful
>The only real solution to the threat of militarization of AI and robotics might be to create a more unified global government and culture.
At this point I think you're joking. Tightly centralizing power always results in oligarchy, kleptocracy, and collapse. And why do you think this central world government wouldn't militarize via your unstoppable robots?
- I think online matchmaking has absolutely destroyed people's ability to feel like they're good at any game.
Like you'll never be a big fish in a small pond. If you played as much as you currently do but could only play with people local to you, you'd be the best person you know at this thing. And that's a really good feeling. But you'll never get that feeling, because you should really be grinding past whatever plat 3 is in order to not suck.
- I remember being in school and thinking that "what if my (color) is your (other color)" was a cool question, and then later I think I reasoned out that color is measurable so the actual color is objective, and the differences between different people is just like... rods and cones that are somehow different between people aka partial colorblindness.
So I don't know what this is.
- That makes sense; it's a predatory business model. It's like auto title loans. They want you corner you, offer you money when you're at your most helpless, then take your car away. If not that then they want to lock you in a debt spiral you'll never get out of and just be a leach on your paycheck forever.
Everyone I've ever talked to has an antagonistic view of these companies and most other american institutions, and the more you hate them and recognize they hate you, the better off you are financially.
- What month was it? Because if it's summer in austin and you're standing around downtown then you probably are struggling in one way or another.
Also downtown austin is disgusting; maybe they were just stunned someone would be there on purpose before the sun goes down.
Hope you enjoyed the museum/trip though
- When I was young, my brother knew a guy who was really into movies. If you wanted to know about a movie you couldn't remember, you would go talk to that guy.
For a while, the internet had an end-run play that made that guy less useful. You can just go on the internet for obscure movie information, buddy.
But now it seems like knowing a movie guy is going to be the only way to get a real person's opinion on movies. The internet is about to forget everything without a profit motive and just start telling you that the latest product from a monolith corp like disney is the only movie worth watching. If someone scrapes all the useful movie opinions off of reddit and spends their time crafting it into a usable format, that guy's probably got a company. But not Bill. Bill's just a guy you can know or not know. You can't monetize knowing Bill. Sidenote that's probably why it irked me so bad when some bozo coined the phrase "social capital".
- it's not just a message board, it's an influence machine.
They need to make sure the stuff they want people to think is posted often and has a big number next to it, they need to make sure things that people like are associated with the stuff they want people to like/think/do and things that people don't like are never associated with the stuff they want people to like/think/do. They need to make sure that people who say the wrong things are silenced or persuaded to leave, etc etc. Man they probably have at least one contact in at least one intelligence agency and they have to make sure not to run afoul of that contact.
Like the news isn't just a list of what happened recently, political debates aren't just two guys talking, and reddit/twitter aren't just message boards.
- idk man i bet you five bucks and a handshake it's just going to play out like the existing startup grift.
There's an established player with institutional protections, then a scrappy upstart takes a bunch of VC money, converts it into runway, gives away the product for free, gradually replaces and becomes the standard, then puts out an s-1 document saying "we don't make money and we never have, want to invest?" and then they start to enjoy all the institutional protections. Or they don't. Either way you pay yourself handsomely from the runway money so who cares.
The upstart gets indexed and has an API, the established player doesn't.
The upstart is more easily found and modular but the institutional player can refuse to be indexed to own their data and they can block their API to prevent ai slop from getting in and dominating their content.
- It's crazy how most political or economic systems would very obviously collapse in the real world almost instantly without some kind of voluntary moral contract (explicit or implied), yet we've got huge clumps of people demonizing one system or another based on the context of what happens when you implement it in a morally dead societal context.
Like there are a ton of people who smirk at your last paragraph and go "nuh uh, hashtag late stage capitalism"
- >some degree of salesmanship
buddy every few weeks one of these bozos is telling us their product is literally going to eclipse humanity and we should all start fearing the inevitable great collapse.
It's like how no one owns a car anymore because of ai driving and I don't have to tell you about the great bank disaster of 2019, when we all had to accept that fiat currency is over.
You've got to be a particular kind of unfortunate to believe it when sam altman says literally anything.
- I sell widgets. I promise the incalculable power of widgets has yet to be unleashed on the world, but it is tremendous and awesome and we should all be very afraid of widgets taking over the world because I can't see how they won't.
Anyway here's the sales page. the widget subscription is so premium you won't even miss the subscription fee.
- It hasn't been like this for a very long time, but "You need to compile the kernel in order to get it to play sound" is still an incredibly effective attack because it puts advocates on their heels trying to defend it as baseline usable.
When you think about its main competition it's a little silly to keep framing it this way, but again, it's extremely effective so it doesn't really matter if it's right.
engineer: interesting. what problems has it helped you solve
social engineer: